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Retirement Investing - Making Your House Your Retirement Home – Part 2

October 30th, 2006 by Papabear

Retirement investing isn’t just about stocks and mutual funds. It’s about spending your money wisely in all areas. Yesterday we talked about making your bathtub more accessible and adding a stair lift to help with climbing stairs. Today we’ll discuss some other practical changes you might consider to make your home better adapted for your later years.

Better lighting is a change you can make now that’s an immediate benefit now and will also help in latter life. As we get older, our eyes can simply use a little extra help. This isn’t needed all the time, but if you have extra lighting, it can be great when you need it.

You can install adjustable lighting that can make a room really bright when you need it but will let you dial the light back at other times. You can also install additional task lighting at your work areas or your home office desk or workbench, over the kitchen sink and under kitchen cabinets.

Adding lighting to your front porch will help you see better who might be at the front door. And adding low voltage outdoor lighting along your front walkway will help everyone from your older friends to trick or treaters make it to your front door safely. A floodlight with a motion detector at the end of your driveway and at your back door will make walking safer at night for you also.

Other changes you might want to consider include grab rails in the bathroom, lever style door handles and wider doorways that can accommodate a wheelchair later on. These changes are much less expensive to make if you’re doing some remodeling anyway. Some day you might need to add a ramp to reach that front door, also.

For many of us, needing such accommodations to limited mobility may be years and years away, or we might never need them. The point is – if retirement is still a few years down the road – keep these needs in mind if you’re planning to do some remodeling soon. It can make life more pleasant now and can save money later on.

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    Retirement Investing - Making Your House Your Retirement Home – Part 1

    October 29th, 2006 by Papabear

    Let’s say you’re a few years from retirement. You’ve decided you don’t want to move out of state. You don’t want to move to a smaller home. In fact, like nearly one-half of all those who retire, you don’t plan to move at all, now or later. Instead you plan to spend some of your retirement investing dollars on making your home more livable for after you retire. What are some of the changes you should make that will be a sound retirement investment when you invest in your own home?

    First up is a little advance planning. Think about what changes will make life easier for you 10 or 20 years down the road. If you’re a bit of a handy-man, now is the time to begin to make needed alterations, while you’re young enough to do the work yourself. If you don’t enjoy doing your own work or don’t seem to have the time now for some remodeling, now is also the ideal time when you have a full-time income to pay for others to make the changes for you.

    Most of the changes you will need to make fall under the general heading of accessibility and mobility. Whether we like to think about it or not, our bodies aren’t as flexible, and we aren’t able to get around as well when we’re 70 as when we’re 50. A few adaptations can make life much easier.

    If you’ve been thinking of remodeling the bathroom, now might be a great time. But instead of putting in that Jacuzzi or garden tub, with the high sides that are hard to get into and harder to get out of, consider something like the walk-in tub from Safety Tubs. It has adjustable power jets for a soothing massage, like a spa tub. But it also has a door in the side to make getting into and out of it much easier.

    As a matter of fact, many older American’s find it very difficult to get into and out of a conventional bathtub safely. Garden spa tubs are even more difficult. Many older folks end up only being able to use a shower. A tub like the Safety Tub will be a Godsend if mobility or bending ever becomes a problem for you.

    Stairs can be a problem, whether it’s 3 steps up to a front porch or living in a two-story house. I found this out the hard way about 10 years ago when I had knew surgery. I never did learn how to climb stairs on crutches. It made me realize how big a barrier stairs can be to those with limited mobility.

    For a permanent solution to getting up and down the stairs, you can install a chair-type stair lift. Do-It-Yourself models start from $2,000 up, such as the Ameriglide. Deluxe models installed by professionals can cost thousands of dollars more. Installing a stair lift can indeed cost a considerable amount of money, but it’s a lot less trouble than moving from a two-story house you like to a one-story house just because you can no longer climb the stairs.

    We’ll continue discussing practical changes you can make to your home to adapt it for your later years tomorrow.

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